by Stanley Anderson » July 22nd, 2008, 7:39 pm
Lewis certainly believed in and expressed the idea that it is evil that tends to have a sameness and blandness to it and good that fosters variety and uniqueness. He mentions this sort of thing in a lot of places -- I can't think of a specific reference that talks about a leaf on a tree, at least in connection with "uniqueness" (which would seem a bit contradictory -- we normally think of leaves on a tree as all being bascially alike). But the idea of goodness, rather than evil, fostering variety and uniqueness can be found in all three of the space trilogy books though most prominent in Perelandra and That Hideous Strength. Also Screwtape Letters and Pilgrim's Regress, and Mere Christianity (I think it is -- I might have MC mixed up with Problem of Pain or Miracles).
And apart from explicit mentions of the idea, one sees the idea expressed simply in the way he writes about things that are evil or good. As I've mentioned before, Lewis is a counterexample to the standard idea put forth by a lot of writers and film makers and actors that bad characters are more interesting than good, and that good characters tend to seem all the same and bland. Lewis was certainly able to write about bad characters in a vivid manner to bring out the horror, but he could write even more vividly and wonderfully and with great variety about goodness and good characters.
By the way, one place where Lewis does use the image of leaves on a tree is in an illustration about "reality" that he uses in the essay "Transposition", found in "The Weight of Glory and other [essays?]" where he describes a woman in a prison cell who tries to teach her son about the "real" world using pencil drawings. I'm not sure that image can be connected very directly to the idea of uniqeness and variety talked about above, but there is certainly some intermingling of ideas there that one could apply to the concept.
--Stanley
…on a night of rain Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a fair green country under a swift sunrise.